Essays

Tribulation, Immortality, the Multitude:
what remedy of composure do these words bring
for their own great disquiet! Without the remoteness
of the Latinity the thought would come too close and
shake too cruelly. In order to the sane endurance of
the intimate trouble of the soul an aloofness of language
is needful. Johnson feared death. Did his noble English
control and postpone the terror? Did it keep the fear
at some courteous, deferent distance from the centre of
that human heart, in the very act of the leap and lapse
of mortality? Doubtless there is in language such an
educative power. Speech is a school. Every language
is a persuasion, an induced habit, an instrument which
receives the note indeed but gives the tone. Every
language imposes a quality, teaches a temper, proposes
a way, bestows a tradition: this is the tone—the voice
—of the instrument. Every language, by counterchange, returns to the writer's touch or breath his own
intention, articulate: this is his note. Much has always
been said, many things to the purpose have been
thought, of the power and the responsibility of the
note. Of the legislation and influence of the tone I
have been led to think by comparing the tranquillity of Johnson and the composure of Canning with the stimulated and close emotion, the interior trouble, of those

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